Stephen Bainbridge's Journal of Law, Politics, and Culture

07/08/2014

The case for engaged legal scholarship

I just read David Hricik& Victoria S. Salzmann, Why There Should Be Fewer Articles Like This One: Law Professors Should Write More for Legal Decision-Makers and Less for Themselves, 38 Suffolk U. L. Rev. 761 (2005):

[The article] advocates increased production of engaged scholarship by law faculty, not as a mere professional responsibility, but as a matter of necessity. Although others have made similar calls in the past, we note several structural reasons affecting lawyers and judges that preclude them from preparing the same quality and quantity of analysis as law professors. No other group--not lawyers, judges, or law students--is in position to provide quality engaged scholarship. The assumption that judges and lawyers are in position to write engaged scholarship is simply wrong. More significantly, the failure of professors to do so degrades the ability of courts to fairly ascertain the law, negatively affects our own students, and could negatively affect the perception of law schools and law faculty held by the public, the bench, and the bar. In sum, there is a need for more engaged scholarship, law professors are uniquely situated to fill that need, and doing so is in our best interest.

...

Lawyers and judges are tending to rely upon their own logic skills, rather than to apply legal theory synthesized and articulated by others. As a result, law review articles are in danger of existing in a medium that is “largely opaque to the judge and practicing lawyer.” Too much of legal scholarship is becoming “law professor scholarship,” a discourse among theorists with little practical application. Even defenders of post-modern legal scholarship admit that “some legal scholarship has devolved so far into deconstructionist or post-modern jargonism as to no longer be coherent.” Some law reviews are becoming nothing more than battlegrounds for theoretical camps where the members fight over their ideas with passionate publications that have no intent of engaging the profession or legal decision-makers.

Comments

The case for engaged legal scholarship

I just read David Hricik& Victoria S. Salzmann, Why There Should Be Fewer Articles Like This One: Law Professors Should Write More for Legal Decision-Makers and Less for Themselves, 38 Suffolk U. L. Rev. 761 (2005):

[The article] advocates increased production of engaged scholarship by law faculty, not as a mere professional responsibility, but as a matter of necessity. Although others have made similar calls in the past, we note several structural reasons affecting lawyers and judges that preclude them from preparing the same quality and quantity of analysis as law professors. No other group--not lawyers, judges, or law students--is in position to provide quality engaged scholarship. The assumption that judges and lawyers are in position to write engaged scholarship is simply wrong. More significantly, the failure of professors to do so degrades the ability of courts to fairly ascertain the law, negatively affects our own students, and could negatively affect the perception of law schools and law faculty held by the public, the bench, and the bar. In sum, there is a need for more engaged scholarship, law professors are uniquely situated to fill that need, and doing so is in our best interest.

...

Lawyers and judges are tending to rely upon their own logic skills, rather than to apply legal theory synthesized and articulated by others. As a result, law review articles are in danger of existing in a medium that is “largely opaque to the judge and practicing lawyer.” Too much of legal scholarship is becoming “law professor scholarship,” a discourse among theorists with little practical application. Even defenders of post-modern legal scholarship admit that “some legal scholarship has devolved so far into deconstructionist or post-modern jargonism as to no longer be coherent.” Some law reviews are becoming nothing more than battlegrounds for theoretical camps where the members fight over their ideas with passionate publications that have no intent of engaging the profession or legal decision-makers.